The General Behavior Of Mass Gravity Flows In The Marine Environment.

Deep sea turbidity currents, mud flows, and debris flows have been the subject of a number of industry and government studies over the past two decades. While evidence of these flow events are common in a wide variety of continental slope and rise locations, the mode, scale, and frequency of these events have been shown to vary widely from place to place. Based on over more than a dozen field and modeling projects, we present an overview of the controls, scale, flow type, and flow behavior. The most general controlling factors are the type and scale of the triggering event, the slope and morphology of the seafloor, and the material properties of the flow. In this overview we focus on details of the evolving flows that need to be included in quantitative analyses with numerical models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]